Pebble: A Language For Hardware Research and Teaching

Pebble is a simple declarative language under development at Imperial College for hardware research and teaching. Pebble supports word-level and bit-level design descriptions which can be customised by different parameter values, such as design size and number of pipeline stages. Such descriptions can be compiled, without flattening, into various VHDL dialects. Pebble also provides an experimental vehicle for research into language support for design optimisation. Such support includes optional constraint specifications, such as placement attributes, at various levels of abstraction, and description of run-time reconfigurable designs. This talk introduces Pebble and the associated tools, and illustrates their application to VHDL library development and reconfigurable design for Xilinx 6200 FPGAs. Current work on approaches for formalising Pebble will also be covered.

LS Home page or Talks in 1998/99